Hi-Fi Rush feels exactly like its creator wanted to make a massive tribute to everything they loved about video games, gathered all of that up, mixed it together and ground it into a powder. Yet to me, one game that oddly kept coming to mind was Saints Row IV, if only because I remember Zero Punctuation describing it as “a big, bouncy, anarchic, irreverent roast of itself and of video games in general,” which not only sounds right here as well, but leads to another term I saw multiple folks using to describe Hi-Fi Rush: “gamelike.” Such a term may sound redundant or even confusing, and yet here fits perfectly.

Now, Hi-Fi Rush is best described as a rhythm-action game, and other folks have described the game with comparisons to Jet Set Radio, Sunset Overdrive, Viewtiful Joeand others, be it on visual style, use of music or combat. From there, they’ll team up with a motley crew of new friends in order to strike back at Vandelay and uncover the secret behind their mysterious project SPECTRA. But fortunately, the music player, combined with the magnetic wand his new arm has, allows Chai to summon debris to create a giant attack guitar and sync up all of their attacks and movement with the music playing in order to help them fight back. Unfortunately, a freak accident gets his music player embedded in his chest, turning him into what Vandelay considers a defect and making them a wanted man. Hi-Fi Rush is the story of Chai, a young man with dreams of being a rock star who signs up for Project Armstrong at the renowned Vandelay Technologies, looking to get a robotic replacement for their crippled arm. So we need to put that part aside for a moment and judge the game on its own merits, and once that’s accomplished, we can truly see that the game is. But while a sudden major release like this is a delight, this has also led to a huge chunk of Hi-Fi Rush’s buzz coming mainly from praise over the shadow drop itself, and coming across like a good chunk of the praise so far come’s from its method of release, how it didn’t suffer from months of marketing, empty promises and whatnot.

Last week saw the surprise release of Hi-Fi Rush, which shocked everyone due to the fact that its existence wasn’t even hinted at until a couple of hours before in dropped into digital storefronts, as well as the fact that it was coming from the Shinji Mikami-led Tango Gameworks, making it a high-profile surprise release.

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